Biography

Professor Timon Screech - The Cargo of the New Year’s Gift: Paintings from London for Asian Rulers, 1615

Art history; social history; history of the East-West relations. Japanese visual culture; Edo period painting and prints; the Dutch Studies movement; Japanese language and culture of the Edo period; history of science and scientific illustration in Japan with reference to East West contact; urban history of Japan; history of Japanese art; sexual history of Japan.; contacts between Japan and Europe in the early modern period.

Research

Current Research

Timon Screech's main current research is related to the history of the English East India Company in Japan, and especially its dealings in works of art. He is book on the subject, The Cargo of the New Year's Gift: Paintings from London for Asian Rulers, 1615, is now reaching completion. He is also studying the deification of the first shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and the cult established for him at Nikko. His major study of the arts of the early-modern period, Obtaining Images, Art, Production and Display in Edo Japan, was published in 2012.

Biography

Timon Screech received a BA in Oriental Studies (Japanese) at Oxford University in 1985 and completed his PH.D in Art History at Harvard University in 1991. He has been at SOAS since graduation from Harvard. He has published widely on many aspects of Edo period art and culture, and has written several books in Japanese and English. He has also been visiting professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, and guest researcher at Gakushuin and Waseda Universities in Tokyo. He was elected to a Chair in the History of Art in 2006.

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